The first bullet hit the man we were hunting in the shoulder. If this had been a film, no doubt he would have clamped his hand over the neat wound, and kept on running. Real life is a bit different.

The bullet came out of him in a gout of blood, flesh, and flashes of white bone. He was knocked flat on his face, unable to get up – partly because his right arm was only held on by strips of flesh.

The sheriff walked up to him, put his gun to the man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

Justice done in this primitive version of the England I once knew.

I didn’t throw up, but I felt like it. I’ve been in the army for four years, but I’ve never seen a man killed – and certainly haven’t seen such casual violence. I hate to think how long I would have survived here on my own - I am just grateful that I met Tom so early on, and have his knowledge of what is acceptable here.

Before I joined the Hermes team I did three months duty with the LN peacekeeping force on the Pakistan border, in the aftermath of the Second Afghan War. I know the League of Nations is seen to be a pretty toothless beast, but I think we did some good work while we were there.

What really strikes me about this version of Britain (or England, actually – Tom tells me that he’s managed to work out that union with Scotland never took place, and that Britain as a nation doesn’t seem to exist) is that it seems to resemble a lot of what I saw in that region of the Northwest Frontier. Norfolk may not be the Hindu Kush, but the primitive buildings, the local warlords (sorry, here they’re just called Lords – nobility seems to be the way this place is governed) and even the casual violence, and routine carrying of weapons vividly brought back my time in Pakistan. About the only difference is the lack of heat and dust.

Tom is staying in a run-down part of the outskirts of Norwich. So far, apart from the cathedral, I haven’t seen a single building larger than two stories. Very few houses are built of brick. Mostly houses, shops and even public building are constructed of wood and adobe, with thatched roofs. Some attempt in the past had clearly been made to build some decent roads, but now even the main street is mostly a series of water-filled potholes connected by strips of tarmac. Most of the side streets are just beaten earth (which at this time of year are mostly covered with a layer of mud).

Tom says that he gathers other parts of the world are far more advanced than this – which explains the jet airliner I saw on the first day I arrived. He thinks, from hints he’s heard from travellers passing through, that the Persian Empire is the dominant world force. England is a backwater, and appears to have been in decline for years. Presumably if, three hundred years or so ago, England didn’t unite with Scotland, then England alone wasn’t as powerful as Britain was in our world, and so I assume there was no British Empire

In many ways, this place reminds me of Darra, where I was stationed with the LN. Like Darra, the major local industry here seems to be making weapons. Every other building, or so it feels, houses a workshop, turning out guns – mainly fairly primitive things, although Tom has a variation of the standard Kalashnikov.

He admitted that they didn’t seem to have invented the AK-47 on this version of Earth, and as it is such a useful, and simple weapon, he decided that he would ‘invent’ it, and showed a gunsmith how to make it. Now the two of them are in partnership, turning them out on quite a large scale. It means that Tom is now quite a wealthy man, and at least I’ve got a decent bed to sleep in, and enough food to keep me comfortable.

Tom has introduced me to the local forces of law and order – which is principally the sheriff, and whoever he deputises to assist him in the dispensing of what passes for justice to those criminals that the Earl of Norfolk (our local representative of the King, power and authority) decides have gone too far. That’s how I got dragged into the manhunt. It wasn’t pretty, and I really think I need to find a way of keeping my head down, and not getting too involved in this world – unlike Tom, I don’t feel the need to build a home here, for I expect to be moving on again before too long.